Zhang Zhongchong, the "Dog Meat General," rose from poverty to command a force of Russian emigres and child soldiers after assassinating General Chen Chi Mei. His 1924 war along the Great Wall against Wu Peifu ended in total ruin before he reclaimed Shandong through corruption, employing the brutal "Steel Sword Policy" of public decapitations and poisoning refugees with soybean waste. While Zhang lived in luxury with foreign concubines, his regime's extreme brutality and famine pushed millions toward starvation, igniting future resistance against the ruling class. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:14:53
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, hi, hi, America podcast.
Robert Evans.
That's you.
Behind the Bastards.
Yeah, we're coming in.
Oh, this one's been rough.
There's been a lot of disasters behind the start of this episode of Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history.
First off, I got the time wrong.
Our guest today, we're doing a reverse bastards where someone reads me a story about a terrible person.
It's another coup.
We have a lot of coups.
We're like, you know, Guatemala, most of Latin America throughout like the 60s to present day, actually.
We're a lot like all that.
And my coup guest today is our friend Christopher from Worst Year Ever.
You know him on Twitter as Ice Must Be Destroyed Guy.
Yeah.
How's it going, Christopher?
It's going pretty good.
I have successfully come out in charge of this warlord struggle.
Yeah.
Successfully.
I've successfully taken control of Beijing.
If not, we'll hold it for about two hours, which is about the average time that people hold Beijing in this period.
Very excited.
Well, you've given us a little bit of a hint about the episode for today.
I want to start this by noting that you are in Chicago, which I thought meant you were in the Eastern Standard Time, because I assume everything east of Arizona exists in the same time zone unless it's Texas.
And that is apparently not the case.
No, for some reason, Chicago and Texas are the same time zone, which makes absolutely no sense.
Livid.
I mean, I think, you know, I haven't spent much time in southern Illinois, but you know, I think if you broke off a bunch of southern, yeah, I mean, they're not like that different.
I just want to let the listeners know that as we were testing our levels for this recording, I went, whose airplane is there somebody, is there an airplane flying over somebody's house right now?
And it was just Robert's foot massager that he thought he could use while we recorded this podcast.
It was worth a shot, Sophie.
It was worth a try.
Look, you know, it's impressive, horrifying.
It wouldn't be the first time.
I keep doing things that create odd noises.
Like a couple of weeks ago, we had an episode where there was like a clinking sound the whole episode, and people kept being, what is it?
And it was a moon clip of 44 plus P ammunition for my gigantic revolver that I was playing with as a desk toy.
I removed that and then I got the foot machine.
So it's just a disaster over here at all times.
You're a professional, but you know, I'm a professional.
This is literally the only thing I do for money now.
Today, you are not our host.
You are our guest.
Today I'm not.
So, Christopher, do you want to tell us what we're talking about?
Want to get started here?
Yeah, yeah, Robert.
I want to ask you something.
How do you feel about warlords?
Oh, I'm very pro.
I hope to be one someday.
The healthcare seems to be shit, but you usually don't live long enough for that to really matter.
I already own a Mauser C96, which a lot of my favorite warlords were during the Chinese Civil Wars.
And that was a popular gun there.
So I feel like I'm already halfway to being a proper warlord.
Yeah, it seems like a good time.
I don't really know any downsides to being a warlord.
Well, sometimes you get assassinated by the Japanese.
Yes.
Seems seems to be the biggest one.
I'm already very worried about that.
So, yeah.
It's a constant problem in the field.
All right.
So this week, we are doing Chung Zong Chung, who is, you know, he's probably China's most famous warlord, but he's 100% the warlord who is having the most fun in this period.
Oh, hell yeah.
That's the guy I like then.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's having a ball.
He's going to make history work for you, you know?
Yeah.
What was that name again?
Chung Zong Chong.
Chung Zong Chung.
Okay.
Zhang.
Yeah.
Okay.
Just call him Zhang.
We'll work with Zhang there.
And I'm pretty good on Zhang.
Okay.
Yeah, I can do this.
We can do this.
Yeah.
All right.
He's also known as the Dog Meat Warlord.
Okay.
I don't know if I like that part with three dogs in the room with me right now.
Yeah, okay.
So we will get to this, but it's not, he doesn't eat dogs.
This is entirely unrelated to the consumption of dogs, which is again pretty incredible considering that he's called the dog meat.
Yeah, I was assuming some eating dog meat probably played.
Not from the eating dog meat.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, yeah, let's get into this.
All right.
Chong was born on February 13th, 1881, in a rural village in Shandong province.
His family was incredibly poor.
Later in life, Zhang will claim not to have known what a pillow was growing up.
Jesus.
Yeah, you know, I mean, Zhang is a character where there's approximately 10 billion sort of myths floating around about him, but I actually believe this one.
Like his family is poor by the standards of 1800s rural China, which is, you know, not a great place to be in the beginning.
That's a whole new benchmark for poverty.
Is like, what is a pillow?
Yeah, it's something.
Well, I'm okay.
Jesus.
All right.
His father played trumpet at funerals and worked as sort of a barber who shaves people's heads for religious ceremonies.
His mother, why he was poor.
Yeah, well, yeah, and you know, and his mom does like small-time ritual magic for money.
Yeah, and you know, as you can pick up on, work is incredibly unstable and infrequent for both of them.
Now, now, this is the era of child labor.
And I mean, okay, it's still the era of child labor, but it was really the era of child labor back then.
And this means that Zhang started his first job when he was either 12 or 13.
And his first job is it's kind of cute.
He would accompany when his dad would play trumpet at funerals, he would go along with him and play cymbals.
Okay, okay, getting into the family business, which is shit.
Getting into the terrible family business.
It's a dangerous thing.
He does not pay enough for pillows.
Good call.
Nope.
Good call.
Yeah, other than the sort of whole crushing poverty part, we don't know a huge amount about his family life.
Other than that, he absolutely adores his mother, which seems to be why when his mother left his father to move to Manchuria, Zhang goes with his mother.
And it's sort of unclear why this happens, but what's most likely seems to happen is that the family just wasn't making enough money to support the three of them.
So Zhang's mother took him to the provincial capital to go look for work there.
This is the first similarity between this Chinese warlord and Dr. Phil, and I'm curious as to whether or not it will be the last.
Yeah, you know, I was thinking about that when I was writing this, and I don't know.
There's a little bit there.
There's a little bit there, except, I don't know, different Dr. Phil doesn't end up in the army.
And I think that's the big difference here.
I mean, I can imagine him as a bandit, but I can imagine Dr. Phil as a bandit for sure.
He is a kind of bandit, a spiritual kind, though.
I think this guy's actually going to work out to be much more ethical than Dr. Phil.
Well, we'll see about that.
Okay.
All right.
So he moves with his mom to Manchuria.
Yeah.
And while he's there, he's about 15 at this point.
He starts working as a servant in a gambling house, which gives him his first exposure to this class of petty criminal.
That's most of his youth is going to be spent cavorting with these people.
And this pisses off the local gentry.
And they just expel him from the city.
Him specifically, not the criminals he's hanging out with.
Why do they need him more than these other people?
Yeah, my guess on that is that the actual local criminals probably have some kind of political power and he just doesn't.
And so I can't really do anything to them, but they just like, yeah, we'll kick you out of town.
Okay.
And so, so, and so once, once there, he does the thing that most young men do when they have no jobs and are thrown into the countryside.
He becomes a bandit.
Hell yeah.
All right.
So this guy's moving up in the world.
He's doing better than his dad already.
Yeah.
Now, we, for somewhat obvious reasons, we know very little about what he was doing as a bandit.
But we do know that his mother, who's now completely on her own, starts to sort of date a series of men for the financial support.
And eventually, a guy she was dating murders her previous ex, and the guy gets sent to prison.
But because this is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, an incredibly fucked up patriarchal society, she also gets exiled from the city for the murder, even though she had no involvement in it.
City leaders just went, yeah, we're exiling you too.
Yeah, your boyfriend murdered somebody.
You got to get the fuck out of here.
All right.
So that's the kind of society.
Okay.
Oh, don't worry.
It gets worse.
That was basically the whole world at this point.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so, yeah, so once she's kicked out, she dates, like, she's able to date one more guy, and she scrapes off enough money to go back to Zhang's father.
But when she gets back to him, he's flat broke and sells her to a grain merchant for some millet, which is apparently a thing you could do at this time.
Wow.
You can just sell your wife to a grain merchant for millet.
I would condemn him for this.
But this is the best financial investment he's made in his life, is it?
I mean, it was a wholesale merchant, so maybe you got a good deal.
Yeah.
He really needed that fucking millet.
Yeah.
Okay.
I shouldn't be laughing.
This is horrible.
But like.
Well, okay.
This is just like such a bleak story.
Well, okay.
So at this point, Zhang's mom just disappears from the historical record for 20 years.
But don't worry about her.
She is the only person in this story who's getting a happy ending.
And like, frankly, after all of this shit, she's like one of the people who deserves it the most.
Yeah.
So yeah, Zhang's mother will return later.
Now, Zhang is banditing for about two years.
But eventually he's able to get a relatively stable job in Manchuria in 1899.
And because Manchuria is going to play a pretty big role in this story, I'm going to give a sort of brief introduction to it.
Manchuria is geographically, it's in the very far northeast part of China.
Like it's kind of like it's China's version of New England, except imagine if instead of bordering Canada, it bordered like Russia, Korea, and was five minutes away from Japan.
So, you know, and when being in the middle of China, Korea, Russia, and Japan means that there's just basically every empire is constantly fighting for control over it.
And this also means that all of the empires wind up putting just an enormous amount of capital into Manchuria's sort of manufacturing belts and railway systems.
And Zhang, Zhang's never able to get one of like the really highly paid stable jobs in Manchuria's arsenal, which is one of the largest sort of weapons manufacturers in China.
But what he is able to get is a job on the Chinese Eastern Railway.
Now, the Chinese Eastern Railway is a Russian concession.
It's one of the concessions that the Qing dynasty has been giving out to the various empires that it loses wars to in the sort of 19th and 20th centuries.
And the way these things work is that like, okay, so when you give possession to a country, you get, like, if you're, if you're, say, like, Britain, you get, you get a chunk of land and you just control that, like, that part of China.
Like, it's just under your control.
You get your own, you can impose your own legal system.
They have their own police force.
And Germany does this too to one of their port cities.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And this happens all over the country.
And there's, there's, uh, there's a, there's a really big and famous like French concession that's just like a third of Shanghai.
Um, this, this is all going to become important later when the sort of just absolutely horrific treatment of Chinese workers in these concessions boils over into just full-scale conflict.
But for right now, the most important thing about Chong's job on the concession is that it gives him his first real contact with Russia.
Concessions and Control00:11:00
Okay.
Now, for all a sort of like lack of education, and it's really questionable whether Zhang really ever got more than like two years of schooling, he's extremely good at learning languages.
Okay.
And he like almost immediately is able to learn Russian and is able to very quickly leverage this job once the sort of railway work dries up to become the chief foreman at a gold mine in Siberia, which was basically because he was the only Chinese worker who could speak Russian.
And the Russians trusted him enough to give him a gun, which would turn out to be great for Zhang and an absolute fiasco for literally every other human being in China.
But it goes great for him.
I mean, that's that is a story you see a lot in this colonial period is like the folks who make bank and are really successful and often wind up basically owning huge chunks of the world are usually polyglots.
And it's the same with the imperial powers too.
Like all of these British colonizers, like the dudes who are actually doing the colonizing, tend to be people who just like pick up language because it's like your number one asset in this period of time, other than shamelessness and sociopathy, is being able to talk to everybody.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, it's really like if you're trying to work in this period, this is like one of this or being a really good bandit are basically like the only two real ways you could even sort of work yourself up in the world.
And, you know, John is doing his birth pretty well for himself here.
He, yeah, so, but, but, you know, one day he's working at this mining camp and the camp is attacked by a bear.
And okay.
I don't know if you know about this, Robert.
I'm just psyched that a bear attack is coming into this story.
This is everything that I want in a story so far.
So please.
All right.
I don't know if you know this, Robert.
Bears, they're really big.
Yeah, they're pretty, pretty sizable.
Yeah, they're extremely strong.
And their mass means that unless you have a very, very large gun, you're not going to bring it down with one shot.
Yeah, I have a bear gun and it weighs like four and a half pounds.
It's a handgun.
Yeah.
What?
Yeah, just continue.
You might need to shoot a bear, Sophie.
Do you want me to not be able to shoot a bear if a bear attacks?
I Christopher.
Look, bears can tip over 700 pound steel dumpsters.
It's not even that much effort for them.
My promise is only like 700 pounds, Sophie.
I'm still scarred from the guy who's running in the recall action in California who's been using a bear as a prop and his ads.
So I'm triggered.
That's all I'm saying.
Okay.
So this bear comes into camp.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Zhang, Zhang, okay, he has this incredibly dinky 1800s rifle and he just easily kills this bear.
So he's got to nailed it through the heart or the eye or something.
Yeah.
I couldn't find a description of it, which is sort of wild.
I mean, it's probably, if it's a mid-1800s gun, I'm certain like the best it could be is probably something like a Dryce Needle gun, which is kind of an early pre-cartridge bolt action rifle.
If it is a cartridge rifle, I mean, if it is a cartridge rifle, the good news is that it's probably a fairly large round because most of the, it was usually like kind of like 30 out 6 or somewhere in that ballpark.
But I'm going to guess the fact that this is the late 1800s in China means that he's not using, like, there's a decent chance it's a black powder.
Anyway, yeah, that's a heck of a thing to be able to do with the kind of weapon he probably was packing.
Yeah, and this, you know, this, this has a fairly predictable reaction on everyone else there.
And he just immediately gets this like cult following among the workers because he just, you know, murdered this bear like extremely easily.
And, you know, this is sort of a point where you start to see the things that are going to make him a really good soldier because he's he's remarkably calm under pressure.
He's an incredibly good shot.
And he's also incredibly charismatic, which is important for a guy who is, and estimates vary here.
This dude is somewhere between six foot six and seven feet tall.
Holy shit.
Yeah, he's tall as fuck.
And he's tall.
He's that tall growing up impoverished in rural China in the 1800s, which is wild.
Yeah, it's unbelievable.
That's huge for people who grow up in the United States with access to all of the protein they could possibly want.
That is, oh, God.
Yeah, he's an absolute monster.
And, you know, like, like at this point, like, it's kind of hard not to be sympathetic to him.
I mean, this is, you know, he's shooting bears.
He's a giant.
He's a bear shooting giant bandit polyglot.
He's pretty rad.
Yeah, he loves his mom.
Like, it's great.
And, you know, because this is behind the bastards, this is where everything immediately starts to go to shit.
Hell yeah.
Let's do it.
Yeah, this is this is like the moment where Saddam is robbing his or is threatening his high school principal at gunpoint before Saddam turns bad.
This is the part where you're like, tell me something bad.
Yep.
Let's go.
So in 1911, a revolution toppled the ruling Qing dynasty and replaced it with a republic led by Yuan Shikai, a man whose sole qualification for this job is that he has the largest army in China when the fighting stops.
I mean, what other qualifications would there be for this job?
Well, you know, for exactly one day, Sen Yit Sen, a man with actual real political qualifications, was in charge.
And then he was like, this guy, Yuan, is the only person with an army large enough to hold the country together.
So we're just going to give it to him.
And so, yeah, Jones upriding this country.
And he's a disaster.
He, you know, he starts in 1911.
He's basically lurching from crisis to crisis.
There's multiple rebellions against him until in late 1915, he makes one of the most baffling and disastrous decisions anyone has ever made in human history.
He convenes an assembly to declare himself emperor.
Now, again, this is a guy who is in power.
Literally, the only reason he's in power is because of a revolution, the sole point of which was getting rid of the monarchy.
And Yuran looks around at the countries collapsing around him and he goes, I know what will unite the nation behind me, declaring myself emperor.
Yeah.
Completely scans.
No flaws with this plan.
Are you going to tell me this doesn't go well?
Now, to his credit, Yan did briefly unite the entire country because basically all of it immediately goes into revolt to drive him out.
And, you know, he kind of remarkably holds on for about three months before deciding that he wasn't going to be emperor after all and politely asking everyone to please stop revolting so we could go back to the business of running the country.
And, you know, kind of sadly, we don't know whether this would have worked or not because three months after he absocates, he dies of an ermia.
Okay.
And with his death in 1916 begins what is known in Chinese history as the warlord period.
Yeah, this is what that game where you stab a bunch of people to death was about, right?
That, no, that's the Warring States period.
Oh, that's the Warring States period.
Lubu.
Lubu is earlier.
Yeah, you're right.
Because nobody had guns.
Everybody was stabbing each other.
Okay.
This is that, but significantly more messy.
That's the name.
Yeah.
This is the Kaiserreich special.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, this is, by the way, why we're bringing you on and we'll increasingly have you on is because I attempted to do several stories about China and other parts of Southeast Asia and very quickly realized that like when I'm doing like Europe, you know, or the United States or even parts of Latin America, just because it's a place I'm closer to and have spent more time in, I have like a certain base of historical understanding that I can build on, and I don't know anything about this.
So I'm fascinated and grateful to you for studying this part of the world for years and years.
Yeah, well, okay, you know, here, let me, let me, let me, uh, let me resuscitate your reputation because there is something that you do, in fact, know significantly more about than I have.
You have been in way more civil wars than I.
I have been in a couple of civil wars.
Yeah.
So I'm going to run my simple model of the two kinds of civil wars past you, and we'll see what you think about it.
Okay.
Okay.
So on the one hand, you have one kind of civil war where half the country starts fighting the other half.
This is like the American Civil War.
You very rarely see this.
And on the other hand, you have civil wars where the whole country fragments into a million pieces and every single one of them starts fighting each other.
Yeah, we call that do in Assyria.
Yeah, yeah, or Yemen.
Or Yemen or a lot of places.
It's kind of the modern way of doing civil wars.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's also what's going to happen in this period, except this war, like I, you know, when I was looking at, when I first looked at the control map, I, like, my brain shattered.
And I've never recovered since.
And like, I've never, I've never longed for the simplicity of the Yemeni civil war before, but this war, there are over a thousand warlords in the period between 1916 and 1928, they fight 700 different wars.
That's, that's too many different wars.
Like, you gotta, if I was in there, what I would say is, like, we can cut that down to 200, 300 at the most.
Like, I feel like, I feel like I could have helped like consolidate the wars.
What they needed was a consultant, a guy to be like, look, you guys are fighting the same war that these guys are fighting.
Let's bundle that into one big war, and then we got less wars to deal with.
My pitch.
That's my pitch to China 150 years ago.
Great.
I mean, look, I'm all for it because it makes the history, it would have made the history like incomprehensibly easier.
Like, there are 20 pages of this script that's just me trying to explain two different factions taking and losing control of Beijing that have, that have become, they're just not here anymore because it's, yeah, this is, this is, this is maybe the messiest conflict I've ever encountered.
And we're about to dive into it.
Yeah.
But first, it's time for products and services.
You know what won't fragment China into hundreds of different warring quasi-state militia things?
These ads, question mark?
They will not.
They will not.
I feel confident saying none of the people who advertise on our show have the kind of like flex to destroy the Chinese state and launch a new civil war.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I just, I don't think the dick pill guys have that much weight to throw around.
I hope not.
I really hope not.
Ads and Civil War00:03:05
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
Okay, ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
Political Survival Games00:15:37
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
All right, let's get going.
Okay, so before we fully launch into this, for reference purposes, we need to stop and do the briefest, most basic, and most half-assed Chinese geography lesson in human history, because this is the point where Chinese geography becomes very important in the story.
So we're going to, we're, look, we're only going to give you two cities.
So I think we could do this.
So at the very south of China, there is Hong Kong.
It's controlled.
Hong Kong is controlled by the British at this point.
It's separated basically from the province of Guangzhou, which is very south of China.
Shanghai is kind of in the middle of China north-southwest, but on the east coast.
And then Beijing is further north of that.
And then the very far north along the border with Korea is Manchuria.
And there's, you know, all of the different sort of warlord cliques in this period because this whole thing is the greatest proof I've ever encountered that high school never ends.
A, it's all clicks.
B, all the clicks form for just incredibly petty reasons.
Like one of the most powerful cliques, a clique that like takes Beijing and rules most of China for four years, happened because one clique of officers thought the other clique wasn't promoting them fast enough.
And to make it worse, all of these people are classmates because they all either went to sort of a couple of military academies either in China or Japan.
Yeah, this is like, I mean, this is the same as a lot of European history, to be honest.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's high school with more guns, which is fairly impressive considering how many guns less.
There's more guns than an American high school, to be honest.
You know, these people have a lot of guns.
Did they do?
Like, it's pretty impressive.
I was taking a cheap shot.
Please continue.
So it's sort of unclear what Zhang was doing during the sort of revolutionary upheaval in 1911.
This is another thing with Zhang.
Every account basically conflicts on what he was doing.
What we know for sure is that by 1913, he ended up as a division commander in the army stationed near Shanghai.
But in 1913, the nationalists, who are known in the U.S., the KMT, for reasons that piss me off to no end, but I will not get in here, stage a disastrous revolt.
And after that revolt fails in sort of late 1913, Zhang gets politically sidelined until the formal start of the Warlord period.
Now, another person sidelined after the failed 1913 revolution was the famous nationalist general.
And this guy, like my mom had heard of this guy, and who had not heard of basically anyone else in this story except for the main character.
So he's an important figure in the KMT and sort of the Nationalist Party.
He's also an extremely important organized crime guy.
And we will get into in the next episode why he's both a KMT general and a crime boss.
This man's name...
Yeah, it's a wild story.
But yeah, for now, this guy's name is Chen Chi Mei.
When the Nationalist Revolt fails, Chen does something that I think Bastards Pod listeners would recognize immediately.
He flees to the early 1900s China's version of Mexico, which is Japan.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Good dude.
Good dude.
It's great.
Yeah.
Solid.
All right.
Yeah, Japan just is.
Japan is literally just Mexico now.
You know, when we screw up in China and the army comes after you, you flee to Mexico.
And you flee to Mexico, or now you flee to Japan.
And while you're in Japan, you have two choices.
You can either just sort of live out your life quietly or you can plot your triumphant return to China.
And the second thing is what Chen ends up doing.
In 1916, Chen saw his opportunity and returns from Japan to Shanghai to start another revolution against the government.
And this is where Zhang takes his first real action of the brave new world of warlordism.
He has Chen assassinated, which this has a number of sort of effects.
One, the nationalists at this point just sort of crumple, and they're not going to be a real political force for a while in China.
The second important thing is that this is how Zhang gets us in with a couple of very, very powerful political patrons.
The most important person here is this dude named Upe Fu, who's also known as the Jade Marshal, who is universally regarded as the Warlord period's greatest strategist.
He runs one of the Warlord cliques.
And he rewards Zhang for his loyalty in having this nationalist guy assassinated.
And Zhang moves up in the world really quickly.
He briefly becomes the vice president's personal bodyguard.
And then eventually he's given a new command in the army of his own.
That's kind of random, no?
Yeah, it's this whole period's politics It's really weird because all basically all career advancement has to do with like which click you're able to please and so you know if you do something for one click they'll give you something and if you fail then they kick you out.
It's it's high school.
Yeah, it's high school except a bunch of people are dying.
Yeah.
Or more people are dying.
Unlike American high school, like Robert.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, we're look.
What I'm getting here, we're all familiar with this.
We all understand the source material here.
Yeah, you know, unfortunately, these people are incredibly fickle.
And Chong managed to lose his entire army in an incredibly minor sort of border dispute war.
And this gets him just kicked back into the political wilderness.
Do they get killed or do they just kind of like peace out from him?
It's unclear.
This is one of those things where...
So we were talking about their 700 wars, right?
So most of them...
This war, I can literally, the only reference I can find to its existence is that Zhang lost his army in it, but it's really unclear what happened.
And so there's two stories of it.
One of them is that they all died.
And then he goes back to Beijing and tries to bribe one of Wupefu's allies with just a bunch of these tiny golden lions to get another unit assigned to him.
But Wupefu finds out about this and kicks him out of the army.
And, you know, okay, bribing a superior officer with a bunch of tiny golden lions is like exactly the kind of thing he would do.
But like the sourcing's not good because again, this man's life is just this incredible haze of stories.
There's some other sources that say that...
So she loses his war and then his army is absorbed into another warlord army.
And then that warlord also subsequently loses a war and collapses.
But either way, what we know is that he fleeds sort of broken completely alone back to Manchuria in 1922.
Okay.
And okay, this is the point where I have to make another brief announcement, which is that there are two completely unrelated dudes in the story named Zhang.
This is largely because one of the early Chinese dynasties essentially got pissed off.
The people in villages didn't, like that they were trying to tax, didn't have last names.
And so they just came in and gave everyone last names.
And yeah, they have like 100 of these names.
These are called like the old 100 names.
And they do this so they can get tax records, get better tax records.
Now every like everyone in China has the same last name because they just force names on people.
Yeah.
So two of the main characters in this in this are the same name is what you're telling me.
Yeah, so there's two big Zhongs.
If I just say Zhang, I'm talking about our hero Zhang Zhong Chong, who is the Dogbeat Warlord.
Okay.
The second Zhang is the guy we're going to meet now whose name is Zhang Zhu Ling.
He's the warlord of Manchuria.
If I talked about him, I'll say his full name or I'll just say his last name so there's no confusion.
Unfortunately for all of history and for us trying to get through the story, basically the moment he gets to Manchuria, Zhang decides to try to join Zhu Ling's army.
And this is another one of those things.
There's a very weird story here, which is so his attempt to get into the army seems to be that Zhu Ling throws this massive birthday party for himself because, you know, okay, so if you're a warlord, right?
Yeah, you're going to have some pretty wild-ass birthday parties for sure.
Yeah, yeah, this is.
What else is the point of being a warlord if you don't?
Yeah, that doesn't even require explanation.
Absolutely.
Yeah, now, now, the weird part about this, so if everyone else shows up to win, okay, so we're meeting the warlord, right?
You show up to a birthday party with incredibly expensive gifts.
Zhang just doesn't show up at all.
What he does instead is he sends these two empty coolie baskets, which are those like, you know, those baskets that...
Yeah, that are being carried.
Like a coolie is like what the British called dudes in India.
They would pay to carry shit for him.
Yeah, baskets people carry shit in.
Yeah, they have like there's like a pole that you hang them off of.
There's a lot of people use them in China.
So Zhang just like gives him these two empty baskets.
And Zhu Ling is extremely confused by this because, you know, okay, this guy doesn't show up to my birthday party and then just gives two baskets.
Yeah, kind of a weird flex for the warlord whose army you want to be in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, apparently, though, what Zhang appears to have been implying and what Zhu Ling somehow figures out through the powers of deductive reasoning that I don't have and I don't understand.
But apparently what Zhang is saying is that the baskets are empty to represent that he would shoulder any burden that Juling would give him.
Which is weird, but this actually works.
But that's like a weird, like, he's doing symbolism shit.
Okay.
Yeah, but you know, this works.
And Zhang is given a minor post in the army, which, you know, we'll take it.
And really fortunately for Zhang, a few months later, there's a revolt in Manchuria, and Zhang is the person who puts it down.
And for that, he's given a much like a, I don't know, I don't know if field grades like the right term for this, but he's given like a fairly promotion.
Yeah, he gets a huge promotion.
And this, this, this one decision is going to turn Zhang from a minor military commander into the most feared and despised warlord in all of China.
That makes sense.
Yeah, and you know, this, this sucks for the rest of China, but for Zhu Ling, this is this promotion turned out to be an incredibly good idea.
In 1922, Zhu Ling brings Zhang with him to negotiate with a group of Russian emigres who become trapped in Mongolia when the country gained independence from China in 1921 and were trying to get out because Mongolia just aligned itself with the USSR.
And these Russians were former members of the pro-Czarist White Army, which, as we know from the show, had been defeated by the combined efforts of great hero pot alum, Nestor, Machnos, Anarchist, Black Army, and the Bolshevik Red Army in the Russian Civil War.
So there's a bunch of these Russian dudes in Mongolia.
And because Zhang's incredibly fluent in Russian, he's able to just sort of extract them and convince these people to work for him.
And this is where Zhang starts building up the core of what's going to be a very dangerous and incredibly formidable army.
He gains about 3,000 Russian infantrymen who are, you know, they're well trained, but they're just sort of infantrymen.
The big deal here is that he gets 1,000 Russian cavalrymen who, armed with lances, your favorite Mauser pistols, and these just enormous fuck-off swords become basically just the backbone of Zhang's new army.
Yeah, and these guys are Cossacks, basically, right?
I don't actually think they're Cossacks.
I think they're just like Russian cavalry, then.
Yeah, I think they're, I think they're just regular Russian cavalry, which is, you know, still just absolutely terrifying.
Like, yeah, like these people have just fought through the Russian Civil War, which is like one of the worst wars in history.
Yeah, they've been through.
They've been terrifying shit.
And they're just, yeah, they're just a bunch of like broken, dangerous monsters.
And everyone in China is terrified of them.
And all the accounts are like kind of racist about it, but it's like, yeah, like, okay, if you were confronted with a group of people who like have been killing continuously for like 10 years now and like who probably read the protocols of the elder Zion to their children as bedtime stories, like I too would be afraid.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
Yeah, no, they sound terrifying.
They probably have a couple of ethnic cleansings under their belt by the time they get to China.
Now, the White Russians also importantly bring another piece of technology from the Russian Civil War, armored trains.
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah.
There's a good armored train stuff here.
There is not a goddamn thing I love more in the world than a good armored train story.
Yeah, there's some...
Sadly, I can't get into the full thing here, but there's one of these trains is absolutely wild.
Like one of these trains was like a train that the Czech Legion had taken to like flee.
So they'd like taken it across half of Russia to like flee and it ends up in the hands of the Japanese.
And then Zhang gets a hold of it here.
And then he starts incorporating it to his army.
And this is also great because so the Chinese World War period, this is like the other great armored train war of the Russian Civil War.
Now these trains, these trains are and they perform extremely well in this war, which is sort of weird because normally they don't perform that great because they have this problem where like okay, so if you just cut the tracks in front of them, they're kind of useless.
Yeah, but that is the downside of trains.
Yeah, but you know when they don't do this, what you get essentially is a troop transport, a tank, and an artillery battery rolled up into one.
And this combined with the Russian cavalry makes Zhang's army incredibly fast.
And this speed gives them like just a really deadly edge against the sort of slower and worse trained warlord armies that are going to sort of serve Zhang well in the upcoming war.
Now, okay, we've talked about the Russian cavalry.
We've talked about the armored trains.
So I think it's time we induced we introduced Zhang's third secret weapon, the baby squads.
Fast Combined Arms00:12:00
Okay, all right.
I'm I'm I'm excited to hear about this.
Yeah, so the baby squads are Zhang's special army of child soldiers who are commanded by his son, who is also a child.
Now, when we say child, are we talking like garrison child or are we talking like child-ass child?
You know, you know, so the estimates vary on this.
They seem to have been in their early teens.
Okay.
Okay.
Like 14, 15?
Well, like 11.
They go, okay.
Yeah, it's, it's, you know, but you know, yeah, I mean, some of them are child child.
Some of them are like older tweens.
Yeah.
And, you know, what's interesting about them, though, is, so they get their own like incredibly fancy uniforms and they get trained with these.
Zhang has custom-made German rifles that can be handled by children, like imported.
Like he, he, he breaks a weapons embargo to get these custom-made German rifles that children can use.
I mean, you know what I always say?
If you're going to arm children, you got to go with German guns.
Nobody knows arming small children and sending them into war like the Germans.
You know, that's just, that's just historical fact.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have historical experience combined with quality craftsmanship.
I mean, they just got through a war where they participated in a battle called the Slaughter of the Innocents because they sent so many children off to die.
You know, they're the right people to go to for child rifles is what I'm saying.
Yeah, you know, it's a good choice.
And, you know, I, okay, so interestingly, so as best I can tell, the baby squads are sort of just like a pet project that Zhang gives to his like teenage son.
But they're, you know, by all accounts, they're extremely well paid and well-fed, which makes them one of like three units in Zhang's entire army that is like paid on time and fed.
So, you know, like, to be fair to Zhang, also, every, like, literally every faction in this war is also using child soldiers.
And it's notable that Zhang spends like a huge amount of effort trying to like kick people out of his army who he doesn't think are fit to fight.
So like in 1925, he kicks like 30,000 troops out of his army for either being bandits, bad soldiers, or just like being too old or too young.
Yeah, that is, that's a lot of that's okay.
Yeah, well, and this is another thing.
These armies, the warlord armies are massive.
Like, and, you know, and they kind of swell during when battles are happening and sort of this like mass conscription, they, like, recruit bandit groups.
But, like, I mean, there are battles in this war where there's, there's, there are single battles with 400,000 troops.
Like, this is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, and, you know, but somehow the baby squads never get caught up in this downsizing.
And so they seem to have been there until the end of the war, which, you know, all in all, it's not the worst use of child soldiers I've ever seen, but it's also not the best.
So, Zhang Zhong Chong, mid-level child soldier user.
Yeah, okay.
That seems good.
I mean, you know, look, look, it's, we've always said on this show, using children to fight wars for you is as much an art as it is a science, you know?
And it sounds like he was pretty good at the science part, but maybe he could have been a little bit more artful in his use of minors as death troopers, for sure.
Yeah.
Nobody's perf- Pobody's nerfed, you know?
You know, speaking of that, though, right?
Like, we're going to get, and here's something.
All right, I'm going to attempt to redeem Zhang after his child soldier army.
So this is also the point in the story when Zhang's mother reappears.
And it's not clear if they'd like found each other sometime in between, like when she was sold off for grain and when he joined the army.
But by 1922, they've reunited and Zhang just like he like loves his mom.
Like they, they, they literally travel everywhere together.
Like every time he goes out to the field, she's on the train.
He just like lavishes her with gifts and meals and attention.
And, you know, and she, she lives out the rest of her life in luxury.
So, you know, good for her.
She deserves it.
It's.
Take care of your mama for sure.
Yeah, yeah.
It's just kind of a shame how her son turned out.
Question mark.
I mean, look, you know, you don't make a happy mom omelette without breaking a couple of other people's children eggs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And really, what are other people's children but fodder for the baby squads?
Well, I mean, the benefit of using children as your soldiers is that it's very easy to make more children.
Yeah.
People have been doing it for forever.
Yeah, it's like cutting down trees when they're young.
Yeah.
You just plant more trees.
Yeah, that's why we have so many trees.
Yeah.
So in 1924, a war starts between Upeifu and his clique, which is based out of Beijing, and Zhang Shuling's clique, which is based out of Manchuria.
And this begins a massive series of set piece battles on what is the greatest set piece on earth, the Great Wall of China.
And this whole war is fought along, like this is the famous part of the Great Wall.
Like this is the part you've all seen pictures of.
It's the part that was built by the Ming Dynasty to keep the Manchus contained in Manchuria.
And this means that in order to get from Beijing to Manchuria, and Zhang Zhongchong is in Manchuria attempting to invade Beijing, you have to go through one of these sort of very small number of heavily guarded passes.
And it's these passes that the Great Wall of China was sort of built to fortify.
So each of their armies sort of mass on their respective side of the Great Wall.
And they try to prepare to force away the fight.
They're sort of forced away through the passes.
Now, while everyone else is fighting this just like incredibly bloody pointless stalemate at one of the largest passes, Zhang moves up to attack another smaller pass, hoping to sort of flank Wupefu's army.
And Chong immediately realizes the pass is way underdefended and just storms his way through it.
But realizing that he was just sort of alone on Wupefu's side of the mountain, he sits in the entrance and he waits for his chance to strike.
And that chance is going to come after what I can only describe as absolute clown shit from one of Wupefu's subordinates costs him everything.
So another very crucial mountain pass is held by the worst commander in Upeifu's army.
This is a guy, yeah, he is a guy who he's a general, but he's been given a general just like because his brother is the president.
Now, Wu's assumption is that this pass, it is literally impossible to screw up defending it because it's narrow and there's an artillery unit.
And so Wu puts the artillery unit there, assuming that, okay, if anyone comes to the pass, you're blowing them up with artillery.
And Wu looks at this guy as like, okay, so we need to keep him out of the fighting because you put him anywhere where he can command troops, he's going to screw everything up.
So we're going to put him in this pass.
It'll be fine.
You can't possibly not hold it.
This would become the single greatest mistake of Wupefu's entire career.
His quote-unquote general, and I'm using this term incredibly loosely, develops this incredibly elaborate scheme where he's going to send his troops through the pass to lure the enemy army back through it so that he can shell the enemy army after luring them in.
If you study any military history at all, it's like, okay, this plan is incredibly convoluted.
There's no way it's going to work.
What happens instead is that Wupefu's general's troops...
Okay, so they go out and they retreat back into the pass.
But this guy mistakes his troops for the enemy and kills them all with his own artillery.
Excellent.
Solid generalship.
Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff.
And the guy on the other, on the other side of the pass, the commander on the other side of the pass is a guy named Han.
And Han watches his opponent blowing up his entire army, rips his shirt off, and just like charges into the pass barechested into the pass's minefield.
Now, between four and five thousand of Han's troops die in this attack.
But by what I can only describe as just an actual act of God, Han just like survives this.
And he disappears into the fabric of history, having won a war by just doing a parody of Dude's Rock by charging shirtless into a minefield.
Yeah, he just fucking Leroy Jenkins to his way to victory.
Absolutely.
Incredible.
And what happens next?
So Wupefu hears about this charge and is like, okay, this moron's charging through the pass.
It's fine.
We have the artillery unit there.
What he doesn't know is that the artillery has used all of their ammo shelling their own troops.
So Han's troops take the pass and the rest of Zhang Zholing's army just floods through the Great Wall.
And it's at this moment where Wupefu is betrayed by one of his subordinates and everything falls apart.
So Wupefu makes, he makes one last desperate attempt to sort of like regroup.
And for a very brief moment, it looks like this is going to work.
But unfortunately for him, Zhang Zhongcheng sees his chance.
He's been sitting on the other side of this pass for the whole battle and he sees his chance and he launches an attack that splits Upefu's remaining army in half and with just a single attack ends Upefu's career.
Or, you know, okay.
So this is what you would think would happen in a normal war when you lose your entire army, all of your territory, and all of your political support collapses.
However, welcome to the warlord period where the rules are made up, the points don't matter, and Wupefu somehow, after literally losing everything, will be back in part two.
God, this whole war.
Hell yeah.
Why not?
I don't believe in this cancel culture bullshit.
So look, I feel like as a warlord, you're not really getting good until you've lost two or three armies, right?
Yeah, it's like riding a bike, right?
You're going to fall a couple of times.
You're going to lose a couple of armies.
You're going to get tens of thousands of people killed.
Like, that's just, you know, there's no avoiding it.
Yeah, and, you know, the product of this is that if you look at the full history of this period, like, it's basically a comic book plot.
Like, there are dozens of characters who lose everything and then reappear and lose everything because just no one ever dies until you see a body.
And even then, like, it's like a Marvel movie.
Yeah, yeah.
It's incredible, except it's somehow less coherent.
Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those things.
The lesson here about all these guys who lose everything repeatedly and keep coming back to lose more things and then some cases eventually win is that what determines winners and losers in history is that the winners lose just as often as the losers, but they have no shame about it.
It's true.
And you got to keep that in mind.
So never ask about how your actions affect other people.
Use them as tools and walk into the pages of history like this guy.
Yeah.
And the other really important thing here, betray your allies at the first opportunity.
Oh, yeah, that goes.
All the people who do well in this war immediately betray all of their friends.
And they get remotely.
You know who won't betray their friends?
I don't.
I actually cannot.
I mean, I absolutely will, Sophie, because as soon as the dogs in your house barked, I threw you under the bus.
You know, that's mean.
That's why I'm successful, Sophie, throwing my friends under the bus.
But you know who I won't throw under the bus?
The products and services that support this podcast until they stop supporting this podcast, at which point they're dead to me.
Betrayal at First Opportunity00:04:25
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Kara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Currency and Nicknames00:14:36
We're back!
All right.
What else we got?
Now, Zhang makes out like a bandit from this war.
So in late 2010.
He is a bandit.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, he is now the supreme bandit, which is really what being a warlord is.
You know, he tries to take Shanghai in sort of late 1924, but another warlord gets there first, and they do this really awkward dance where both of them occupy parts of the city, and everyone in Shanghai is like, oh, God, they're going to fight a battle here.
Please go fight somewhere else.
Don't destroy our precious city.
And so eventually, like, this winds up involving a bunch of foreign governments and there's this huge set of negotiations.
And eventually, the two warlords work out an agreement where they're both going to pull out of the city.
Now, the other warlord abides by the agreement and pulls his army out.
Zhang just doesn't leave.
He just stays there and occupies the city.
And, you know, several months into 1925, he finally gets an order to leave Shanghai.
But he's only sort of convinced to leave the city after he's given full control of his home province to Shandong, as well as the really frankly delightful title that we should bring back Bandit Extermination Commander.
I like it.
Yeah, he gets that for like a couple other provinces.
And it's in this moment as he sort of takes Shanghai and is given control of his home province of Shandong that he really becomes the dog meat general.
Now, Zhang was never like the best dude even before he was given absolute power over an entire province and an enormous fuck-off army.
I mean, you know, to repurpose the old anti-Nixon song, power corrupts, we know that by heart, but you have to admit Zhang had a head start.
And just the moment he takes real power, he goes wild.
And one of the immediate products of this is he just starts collecting just this unbelievable pile of nicknames.
His most famous is Korojanjing or the Dog Meat General, a title he gains because of his reputation for playing a Chinese gambling game.
It's like domino-based.
And for some indescribable reason, people in Manchuria call this game eating dog meat.
I don't know why this is.
Like, the best I could come up with is that one of the words kind of sounds like dog, but who knows?
Now, confusingly, I've also seen claims that he did actually eat dog meat because he thought it would make him more virile.
Because dogs do fuck a lot, for sure.
Yeah, but, you know, the sourcing on this is not great.
And it has no relation to why he's called the Dogmeat General.
So I just want to make it clear.
He's called the Dogmeat General because this dude, he spends so much time gambling.
Like, half the descriptions of him that you read are just like from some diplomat or from like some high society person just ran into him at a gambling den.
Now, I'm just going to read out his list of the rest of his nicknames because like, Lord Almighty, this dude has more nicknames than any other person I've ever heard of.
Okay, his nicknames.
The tiger, big tongue, blue sky, the dragon, the bearded bandits.
Big tongue.
We got a...
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to have to take a second here.
Why big tongue?
Half of these, I have no idea.
Okay.
Like, it's really weird.
He just, every source has, like, a different thing of nicknames.
Yeah, we'll explain some of them.
Yeah, he has the dragon.
I think the dragon is because he has like the...
I don't know.
He has some sort of complicated relationship to the dragon emperor that we're, who's a mythological figure we're going to get to in a little bit.
He's called the...
Start that list again.
The tiger, big tongue, blue sky, the dragon, the red-bearded bandits, the monster, the lanky, the lanky general, the three doesn't know's warlord, 72 Cannon Jong, the general with three long legs, old 86, and the long-legged general.
Yeah, okay, we're going to get to that part in a second.
So his second most important thing is that the same thing.
It sounds like he fucks from those nicknames.
It sounds like he fucks.
Yeah.
Okay.
We'll do this.
Okay.
So Old 86.
That one.
Yeah, so as you've gathered, the last three of these ones are just about his dick.
Old 86 is the most interesting one because supposedly it's because his dick is as long as a stack of 86 Mexican silver pesos.
That's amazing.
Now...
That just brings up so many questions because we're again in China.
So why is the peso anyone's go-to for the size of this guy's dick?
So Mexican silver pesos have long been used in hard currency in China dating back to the 1500s when the Ming's insatiable demand for silver formed the base of the Ming currency system.
That results in them importing a huge amount of the silver that's removed from Spanish-controlled mines in Latin America.
So yeah, Ming Dynasty, they do great things for quality of life, are also kind of responsible for all the genocides in Latin America.
Not great.
Yeah, well.
Yeah.
I mean...
To be fair, they didn't know where it was coming from, but...
Yeah, they just needed to measure people's dicks.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, as sort of various currencies collapse during the warlord period, people keep using Mexican silver pesos as coins are just worth their weight in silver.
I'm just, I'm still, I'm still working through in my head the, wow, the boss has a huge dick.
Hey, get some of that silver.
I want to figure out exactly how this dick shakes out in pesos.
So, so one of my, one of my friends who has experience with Mexican coins from this period calculated that 86 pesos stack on top of each other means that this dude's dick is 8.8 inches long.
Okay, that's believable.
Yeah, and you know, this is this is the kind of thing that like you'd expect.
Okay, this is like the kind of myth-making you'd expect to get from warlords, but like stunningly, this like seems to be true.
Yeah, I mean, 8.6 inches.
If we're, if he was like, yeah, he's got like a 14, 15-inch dick, I'd be like, okay, well, this sounds like some Rasputin nonsense.
But 8.6 is like, yeah, it's a pretty good size dick, but that's not like, we're not talking outside of the realm of possibility here, especially for a dude as big as this guy.
8.6 inches for a near seven feet is just kind of like, yeah, that sounds like, sounds about right.
Yeah.
And he, you know, as you guess, this dude just fucks all the time.
I, yes, I had gathered that from his nicknames.
I'm pretty sure the tongue one is about fucking too.
Yeah, I think so.
There's another one that's like famous, which is about the three doesn't know his general, which is because his most famous quote is that he doesn't know how many, he doesn't know how many troops he has.
He doesn't know how much money he has, and he doesn't know how many women he's having sex with at any given moment.
It's the most warlord shit ever.
I mean, you're not making being a warlord sound like a bad gig.
Yeah, you know, and this, this, this seems like as good a time as any to mention that this is the period where Zhang starts traveling around with special train cars for his 42 concubines, the names of which he just didn't know and thus referred to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're a warlord.
I don't expect you to know anyone's name.
Yeah, you know, you know, so contrary to Zhang, I spent a pretty good amount of time trying to figure out who these women were.
And there's just that is nice of you.
There's just like a really depressing lack of interest in his women's lives, just like across the whole academic literature.
What I was able to find out about them was that half of them are Russians who came with the white army.
And the rest of them are either sort of Chinese, Japanese, or American.
But we don't really know how Zhang got his hands on them.
These are a lot of foreign languages.
Yeah, and that's like one of the big things that all of the sort of like media people pick up on.
It's like, wow, he has like white prostitutes.
And it's like, okay.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sure that makes the news back in New York.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, it's possible that some of these people had been sex workers in Shanghai, but it's also possible that Zhang's troops, and the white Russians do this literally all the time.
Just literally grab them off the street at random.
Because, you know, we're starting to get at the downside of the warlord period, which is that like, yeah, so if you're like a woman, like a woman in the street of China, someone can just like grab you off the street and you're a concubine now.
But, you know, and what I think is really depressing about this is like, like, we don't know what their relationship to him was.
All of the sources, they don't even agree as to like, like, half of the sources call them concubines and half of them call them wives.
And like, we don't know if they're there against their will.
We don't know if they're getting paid.
We just, we don't know anything about them.
And it's extremely frustrating, especially because Chung appears to have had kids with some of these women, but we don't know what happened to them.
We don't know what happened to the women.
We don't know what happened to the kids.
And, you know, there's a lot of other very weird stuff here.
I saw some evidence that some of the dudes that Zhang was sleeping with were men, which implies that like he's bi.
But again, this is one of those things.
I mean, also, when you're that kind of powerful person, it's almost less about sexuality and more about just like power.
Like you just fuck people because they can't not fuck you because you're the warlord.
I think that is some of these dudes.
Like it's almost not worth kind of trying to box them into a sexual category.
It's kind of like how rape is less about sex than about power for this kind of person who power is everything for.
It's just like he kind of he just fucks.
Yeah, and there's a sort of interesting consequence of this, which is that like if you look at like Zhang's life, he kind of just turns into this just like physical embodiment of structural forces.
It's like, okay, so like, what is the patriarchy, right?
He's like, well, here is this dude whose whole thing is that he like he literally physically reduces women to numbers.
And you get this with sort of in various different ways with like state violence, like the banking system, where like a lot of what Zhang sort of reveals is that it's just all of these systems are just a dude with a lot of guns.
And if you, yeah, if you just give like a gun, we're watching shit go down in Gaza right now.
Yeah.
All of the systems today are still just dudes with guns.
We dress it up more and less.
Yeah, well, really, the only difference between it is the amount of legitimacy you have.
And yeah, you know, this legitimacy problem is like, this is a big thing for all of the warlords.
And Zhang just doesn't try to solve it, which is what makes him unique.
Everyone else is doing this like, oh, I do, I plant gardens.
I do public works.
And Zhang's just like, nah, I'm just going to have fun.
Now, okay.
Yeah.
The consequence of this, though, is while Zhang's like jet-setting around with a train full of like maybe sex slaves, what's happening in Shandong, the province has been handed control over is, oh boy.
Some of it is pretty funny.
Like, so when he leaves his office every day when he's in Shandong, he has like all the streets cleared.
And then he has a bunch of people like sprinkle clean water on the road to prepare it for him to walk on, which is just like, this is some great petty dictator shit.
Like, yep.
And he also, you know, he does a thing a lot of dictators do, which is he starts issuing his own paper currency.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Is his face on it?
So this is, I couldn't find much about it because, and the reason is for this is he just gets bored of it and stops printing it.
And then after that, she starts making everyone use military stamps as money.
Oh, man.
I, you know, I'm on board with 80% of this guy.
Everything but the probable rape, really.
Yeah.
You know, and I think this is, this is, this is what puts him, like the fact that he's not using his own currency, that he's using military stamps.
This is like what puts him like a tier above the rest of the warlords because the rest of the warlords is like, ah, whatever.
I'll print my own money.
But Zhang's like, okay, so these stamps are made in Manchuria, which means I don't have to pay for them.
I just get set them.
So if I use these stamps as money, I don't have to like spend the money to like make your own fake paper currency.
Hey, look, you don't, you don't get an army, lose an army, and then get another army, and then lose another army, and then get another army, unless you're pragmatic.
Yeah.
And, you know, we can see some examples of his pragmatism.
So there's a famous story of like at one point a merchant is just like, these are stamps.
This is not money.
So Zhang has a dude taken out of his shop, beaten and shot, which, you know, funnily enough, this is how states forced originally forced people to use money.
And it like worked because money is the thing that like when the state asks you for it, you have to give them like give it to them.
Yep.
Yeah.
And he also, so the other thing he starts doing in this period is he starts going to banks and just like pulling out guns and telling them to give him loans, which yeah, that's, I mean, I look, I am currently in the process of wanting to buy a house, but a lifetime of shit credit is making that difficult.
And I might do the same thing.
That seems like a pretty good idea.
This is one of his best ideas.
And it's great because I will pay the loan, but I am going to get it at gunpoint.
Yes.
Fucking credit.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
The other funny part about this.
So there's like a bunch of banks in Shandong that have been open for like a lot, like a couple hundred years, and he drives like six of them out of business because he just like takes all of their money in loans.
But unfortunately, now we have to come to the really bad stuff.
Yeah, you know, we've been having fun, but oh boy.
I hate it when people do this to me because I normally do this to people.
Yeah.
It only took us like 14 pages.
Yeah.
So one of the most famous accounts of what's happening in Shangdong during this Shandong from this period comes from a guy named Joseph Stilwell, who, okay, I need to mention at the outset.
Brutality as Policy00:07:28
Stillwell, enormous racist, huge piece of shit.
He's a white guy in China in this period.
Yeah.
Naturally, yeah, but like naturally, because he's incredibly racist and piece of shit, he goes on to be an incredibly important American general in World War II who fights in the like the China and India theater.
So that's great.
He's like still beloved in the U.S. for reasons.
But you know, his account, his account of it like matches with other stuff I've seen.
So I thought I'd start with that.
So Stillwell's there.
Stillwell's in Shandong in 1927.
And what he describes is these huge swaths of population made homeless by war, huddling together desperately in packed city streets without even a tent to shelter them at night.
Bodies began to pile up on the streets, but there was no one to take them away.
And the corpses stayed where they fell as famine ravaged the province.
Zhang's solution, if it can be called that, to this problem of famine is industrial waste.
So one of Manchuria's chief exports in this period were soybean cakes, which is, it's basically like, it's a bunch of massive soybean that's been smushed together.
And I want to say at the outset, so when I call these cakes, right, these are cakes in the sense that like cakes of uranium are cakes.
Like they're not food.
This is an industrial product.
And, you know, what you do with them is that you ship them somewhere else and then you squeeze the oil out of them.
And that oil is used to make like, it's used in like a number of important industrial processes.
And what it leaves behind is this even worse, like quote unquote cake that's waste material.
People use it as fertilizer.
Sometimes use it to feed pigs.
And this is what Zhang starts to import from Manchuria and use to feed the refugees.
Yeah.
I need to reiterate this.
This is not food.
This is an industrial waste product.
It's edible in the sense that it will fill your stomach and temporarily stop hunger pangs without actually providing you with nutrition.
Well, and it might just poison you because again, like these things are being just taken from a factory, right?
Like, you know, this is what's happening to people that he's trying to help.
The people that he's not trying to help.
So I think that the best way to sort of understand how brutal his army is in this period is that everywhere his army goes, it starts to change the language of the provinces because every time they find a new way to murder someone, it gets popular.
Like people have to come up with a new term for it.
So for example, one of the things in the beginning of this is there's an expression that becomes popular called to cut apart to catch the light, which means like taking a skull, splitting it in two, and like exposing the insides of it to the sun.
Okay.
Yeah.
And the thing is like that, you know, you split enough skulls.
It's like, okay, whatever.
And so the troops get bored.
And when they got bored with that, they come up with another one, which is they would split skulls in half, like fully clean in half.
And then they'd find a telephone pole that's like connected by a wire to another telephone pole.
And they'd hang the skulls on each end of the telephone pole at opposite ends of the wire with their ears like pressed up to the things that looked like they were listening to the telephone.
And this becomes so widespread, the phrase he'd been made to listen to the telephone becomes like another popular expression in the province.
Jesus, that's dark.
Yeah.
It's you know, this whole reign of terror became known as the steel sword policy after Zhang's policy of just decapitating his political opponents and splitting their heads with swords.
And when I say- Yeah, that one's pretty straightforward.
But, you know, when I say this is his policy, right?
I mean, he is literally personally doing this.
Like, he is the guy holding the sword, chopping people's skulls open.
Yeah, he's a man of action.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, when you're six foot seven and you have a bunch of really sharp swords, like, yeah, you can use it.
Look, I mean, again, he's making a lot of calls I, too, would make in his situation.
Yeah.
And there's, you know, there's, there's, I, I, I think, I think you will also appreciate this one as a member of the press.
So very early on, when he first takes power, one of the earliest instances, like the steel sword policies, there's an editor of a newspaper who, like, publishes an article criticizing him.
Oh, that's not a good idea.
Yeah, yeah.
So Zhang has a newspaper editor dragged out of his office and shot in the street.
And then like, you know, after that, all the newspapers sort of stop criticizing him.
Now, and I should mention this.
What Zhang and his men are doing here is not just random violence.
Zhang has the same legitimacy problem that every other warlord does.
And his solution to it essentially is to cut the Goryan knot and kill anyone who opposes him in ways so public and so violent that no one would ever dare do it again.
Okay.
And this has a devastating effect on the population in Shandong.
The effects of constant warfare, bandits, droughts, and locusts combined with the sheer brutality of Zhang's extraction of wealth to leave four to nine million people, like including my family, by the way, who are in this province in the period, on the brink of starvation.
Which, luckily, that part's not rad.
You know that.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's nice to have a family connection to a story.
Yeah, yeah.
I discovered it in the middle.
I'm like, we have some records from that period.
And I was like, I'm not going to read these.
Like, I'm just not.
Yeah, that seems like it would be pretty dark.
Yeah, yeah.
And so while the masses ate fertilizer to stay alive, Zhang was partying with an endless succession of local sycophants who laughed at his every word for a chance to turn a chunk of his favor into a chunk of his stolen wealth.
He was gambling fucking constantly, just completely wasted literally all the time.
Like driving around with this personalized Belgian dining set in his personalized train with a bunch of women taken from like who knows where.
He's having the absolute time of his life.
Yeah.
And that's the image I'm going to leave you with today.
Zhang Zongcheng living out his wildest dreams.
Yeah.
While the people of China died in droves around him.
And in part two, we're going to see what happens when an increasingly out-of-touch ruling class leads its people to die in words in the streets when they protest.
Because in part two, those ordinary people are going to start to fight back.
Well.
That's your focus, Robert.
It was off the internet for a while.
Look.
Well, Chris, this has been a great episode.
I'm still more on this guy's side than not because I love Meo Warlord.
And it sounds like he's doing the right thing, right?
He's living it up, committing horrible crimes against humanity, drunk off his ass, just being a being a king about it.
So, I don't know.
I'm excited to see where this guy goes.
Yeah.
Yep.
Do we have any pluggables to plug?
Yeah, so I guess I'm it mechr3 or the icons be destroyed dude on Twitter.
Yeah, I have a sub stack called With a long 21st century, which I swear I do occasionally post to it, and I'm also not a TERF.
Yeah.
All right.
Great.
All right.
Well, we will be back with more of this guy and more horrible war crimes.
I'm going to guess more horrible war crimes, Chris.
Yeah.
More Horrible War Crimes00:02:38
If anything, they get worse.
Yeah.
Well, check in for that.
And remember, if you're going to be a warlord, you kind of got to go all the way.
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